Unveiling the Challenges of Marketing Amidst A Concealed Economic Downturn

“Every penny counts.”

We’ve all heard this sentence multiple times after the digital boom during the pandemic started to slow down. I remember people starting to panic around spring 2022, forwarding each other articles about decreasing investments in AdTech and MarTech due to economic uncertainties. The whole industry became an echo chamber of pessimists, who kind of turned out to be right all along.

Then, shifts in global behavior towards spending happened. The grim reality is that younger generations are hopeless towards their financial future. For many, the best use of their income is either fashion, or iced lattes, as proven by recurring Instagram jokes. Hopeless young people resort to dopamine spikes, which is where e-commerce steps in. With the help of frictionless payment processes, we seem to be spending more than ever and macroeconomic indicators are positive.

Huge gaps in global and generational wealth distribution affect consumer behavior deeply, but businesses also feel the pressure of having to adapt to changing circumstances. They have to keep up with competition while making every cent work. Everyone is cautious. All in all, it’s tough out there, but marketing professionals seem to be the ones facing multiple challenges amidst an economic downturn.

Is the marketing industry experiencing a different reality than positive macroeconomic indicators? This article reports that an overwhelming majority of CMOs experience reduced budgets, longer deal cycles, staffing cuts, and a pressure to deliver more with less. Let’s break down some challenges these marketers are facing.

• Hours spent on reporting just to combine and analyze fragmented data across platforms. It’s 2024. Humankind managed to operate rovers on Mars. Surprisingly manual work, isn’t it?
• Achieving better results with reduced budgets. How are marketers supposed to meticulously keep track of each campaign constantly, see where they’re doing well, adjust their strategies, adapt quickly, and with fewer people?Staying on top of everything with a smaller team. Refer to the bullet point above.Justifying the use of every cent. This one is tricky. It requires having to explain the nuances of marketing, or even worse, the importance of marketing to top executives who are not marketers. Luckily, it’s not the relativistic mass-energy equation (I had to Google this) so some simple spot-on numbers will usually do the trick. However this requires a thorough analysis of large chunks of fragmented data and well — refer to the first bullet point above.

Even though many of us feel like they’re living in a dark reality, we’re lucky to witness the growth of technologies solving even challenges people have just started to talk about. Orphex unifies and analyzes fragmented data across channels and provides AI-based actionable insights. All the marketers under pressure need to do is press a few buttons — and voilà.

Honestly, no one should suffer through hours spent on Excel or Sheets just to do what a single platform does within minutes. Check it out, and redefine digital excellence.